March 1st, 2009
Sermon – “No Litmus Test for Jesus”
By Bryan
Society in the United States in 1917 was one filled with much fear and misunderstanding. The end of the Progressive Era and its Social Gospel message of reform, the onset of World War 1, and the Bolshevik Revolution raised anxieties in the minds of many Americans. One significant manifestation of this fear was the rise of xenophobia; Americans grew more and more wary of outsiders. This nation, which was built on the sweat and blood of immigrants from many different countries, now turned its back on these very same people. Beginning as early as 1882, ideas of immigrant restriction had been circulating with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. A decade later, the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1 8 94, argued that the best way to keep out “undesirables” was a literacy test. Their campaign bore no real fruit at the outset as the various initiatives passed by Congress in 1896, 1909, and 1915 were vetoed by presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson. It wasn’t until 1917 that a literacy bill was finally passed and made to law over the veto of Wilson. The United States had created in essence a situation where immigrants had to pass a litmus test in order to gain entrance. There were already in the law books litmus tests for African Americans and former slaves. Now anyone wanting to become a citizen of the United States had to pass a test.
The immigration policy of the United States in the wake of World War 1, which was capped with the passage of the Johnson-Reed National Origins Act in 1924, presents a situation all too common in our human history, both personally and communal in. Similar situation said existed through out human history and still exist even today. We hear the echoes of these feelings articulated in the first lesson that we heard today from 2nd Kings.
